The Canadian Watershed Information Network (CanWIN) is a Canadian spatial data research infrastructure (SDRI) system hosted at the University of Manitoba and managed by the Centre for Earth Observation Science within the Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth and Resources. We support research and education, and inform management, policy and evidence based decision making within the Nelson River Watershed and into the Arctic via Hudson Bay. By creating an interoperable infrastructure, CanWIN facilitates the discoverability and accessibility of water and climate related data across the freshwater-marine spectrum.
Partners
CanWIN partners with freshwater and arctic data centers across Canada and globally. It is a founding member of the Canadian Consortium for Arctic Data Interoperability (CCADI) a pan-Canadian collaboration of arctic data centers and domain experts such as Amundsen Science who are developing an integrated Canadian arctic research data infrastructure system (ARDI). CanWIN partnerships with freshwater research and data centers include the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium and the International Institute for Sustainable development – Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA) where we collaborate on standardizing and sharing freshwater research and community collected datasets.
Data Management
CanWIN is mindful of the CARE, FAIR and OCAP principles for data sharing and supports the sharing of open data in a way that considers both people and purpose in open data advocacy.
Data Architecture
CanWIN was created as a distributed data system. This allows us to easily store and share data in multiple formats from many disciplines. The CanWIN datahub Home page acts as the main entry point from which users can search for data held on any of our servers. Users are able to download data located on any of the servers from the Dataset page - in addition, they are able to access additional features provided by our other servers (e.g. map data) from the Quick links bar on the Home page. The diagram below shows the key components that make up the CanWIN Ecosystem. They include the main CanWIN platform which uses CKAN, a geoportal for map viewing and creation, and an ERDDAP server for advanced data manipulation.
